Preserving childhood memories

You may or may not know this, but video quality in tapes (VHS more so, Beta a little less so) degrades with time. Photos too, and some kinds of photo paper degrade faster than others, and most people have no idea when they go out to have those rolls first developed.

We take those photos and make those videos because our memory fades with time. Little did we know that those old home videos and albums full of photos would fade too!

But you can put an end to this: Digitize. By digitizing your videos and scanning your photos you turn them into ones and zeros, and those don’t fade with time. I’ve been begging my mom to have our videos and photos digitized for years! I know it’s a lot of work… but maybe one day?

Shlomit decided to tackle this problem and just took all her family photos (about 5000) out of their albums and shipped them off in three boxes to ScanMyPhotos. In less than a week the photos came back along with three data DVDs. It was a lot of work, but well worth it!

The nice thing about digital photos (besides the fact that they don’t fade, you can copy without a loss of quality, you can email them, and they take up no physical space) is that even though the colors may be faded on the originals, you can always do a little bit of restoration on the computer without too much work.

I grabbed one random photo whose colors were badly faded and did some very quick color-correction using iPhoto‘s built-in tools – nothing terribly fancy. The results were better than I expected: